Why Python 3?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 18 Apr 2014 23:40:18 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

> It's just that the improvement
> from 2 to 3 is rather small, and 2 works perfectly well and people are
> used to it, so they keep using it.

Spoken like a true ASCII user :-)

The "killer feature" of Python 3 is improved handling of Unicode, which 
now brings Python 3 firmly into the (very small) group of programming 
languages with first-class support for more than 128 different characters 
by default.

Unfortunately, that made handling byte strings a bit more painful, but 
3.4 improves that, and 3.5 ought to fix it. People doing a lot of mixed 
Unicode text + bytes handling should pay attention to what goes on over 
the next 18 months, because the Python core developers are looking to fix 
the text/byte pain points. Your feedback is wanted.


> There are nice tools that help port
> your codebase from 2 to 3 with fairly little effort. But, you can also
> keep your codebase on 2 with zero effort. So people choose zero over
> fairly little.

True. But for anyone wanting long term language support, a little bit of 
effort today will save them a lot of effort in six years time.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/